Monday, November 24, 2008

Dinner Wrap

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this month's group writing project, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Once again I was amazed at the creativity and the variety of your ideas, in this case about which sailors you would invite to a dinner party. It was also very gratifying to see some new folk submitting entries this month. There are clearly some very talented sailing writers out there.

Here is the final list of all the entries. If you wrote about more than one dinner guest (as was allowed and even encouraged) I have usually just selected the one that I thought most interesting in this summary list.

Wavedancer wants to invite
Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter, some dead Dutch admiral, who created havoc and terror among the residents of London with a raid on English naval ships in the River Medway back in 1667, thereby starting a soccer rivalry between England and Holland lasting over 300 years.



Pat, the Desert Sea sailor, considers a wide range of possible invitees, but ends up concluding that he should invite the kids.


By way of contrast, Pat's other half, Carol Anne, wants to invite Zorro as guest of honor at her garden party. Yikes.



M Squared ruminates about the intersection of wind and bytes and chooses as his guest of honor Jim Gray a pioneering computer scientist, and sailor too, who went missing last year while on a solo boating trip from San Francisco to the Farallon Islands to scatter his mother's ashes.



Em Dy would like to have dinner with Captain Jack Sparrow. Whether he would enjoy her menu I'm not sure. It includes balut, unborn duck fetus.


Andrew Sadler wants to use his dinner party to set up a meeting over a hamper and Italian wine between Simon Payne (of foiling moth fame) and that famous Renaissance sailor, Leonardo da Vinci.


Redwing invites a whole raft of famous explorers and sailors, needing two posts Parts 1 and 2 to tell the whole tale of his dinner party. My own hero among his invitees is the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, CVO, OBE, Kt. Here is his ship Endurance trapped in the pack ice which eventually crushed it.


Adam would also invite Shackleton's ghost, along with some other sailing luminaries including Rear Admiral Sir John Aubrey, KB, MP, JP, FRS.


O Docker would invite The Pied Pipers of Newport Beach a.k.a. Lin and Larry Pardey.



David Anderson invites a mixed bunch of characters to his crazy party including Nick Scandone who was diagnosed with ALS in 2002 and who, with his crew Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, won the SKUD 18 gold medal at the Paralympics this year.



Some geek wrote a post Cheers about inviting to dinner various unsavory characters with weird names who play with him in some computer game. Here's a photo of the most normal guest...


Walter Mondale envisages a summer picnic by the side of the River Thurne in Norfolk for his party. I think he wins the award for most diverse guest list which includes the Duke of Edinburgh, the delightfully named Emily Fabpants, and Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, KB.


Greg and Kris called their dinner The Studs Terkel Memorial Sailing Supper and invited some sailors slightly less well known than Admiral Lord Nelson. I didn't know any of the guests but I assume that Kris will be the hostess of the party, which is a great excuse to use this photo.



Captain JP chose William Dampier has his guest of honor. Old Bill doesn't look like much fun in the portrait below. But he has been described as the "greatest nautical explorer-adventurer, British or otherwise, between the Elizabethans (notably Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh) and James Cook" so I'm sure he would have some fascinating tales to tell.



Edward is a Serious Ocean Going Racing Sailor and writes about a dinner he actually hosted with two Even More Serious Ocean Going Racing Sailors. One of them is called Phil. Here is a picture of some guy called Phil from Edward's blog who is so cool he is actually yawning while doing some Serious Ocean Going Racing. It might be the same Phil. Probably is. Whatever.



Update: A late entry from tugster 1941 Ship.

5 comments:

The O'Sheas said...

Nice recap. :)

PeconicPuffin said...

Zorro sails?

Anonymous said...

Zorro may not have been a sailor. But his twin gay brother was. Check out the plot of Zorro, the Gay Blade.

PeconicPuffin said...

Had I know that I could write about having dinner with someone whose twin gay brother was a sailor, I would have written something.

The O'Sheas said...

Bunny Wigglesworth was not on the exclusion list. Of course you could have contributed. Go ahead, tell us all now about how your dinner with Zorro's brother would have gone. Spare no detail!

But keep it PG-13, please.

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